On September 13, 1848, Phineas Gage suffered a severe brain injury, which caused him to have a drastic change in his personality. Gage was a foreman for railroad construction workers when his injury happened. Gage and his crew were working on the Rutland and Burling Railroad in Cavendish Vermont. Gage's job on the railroad was to remove the large rock sections by shattering it from the inside out by drilling a hole, filling it with explosive powder, inserting a fuse and then pouring sand on top of the fuse. After the sand was poured, Gage would then begin tamping down the sand with an iron rod. "The tamping iron was 3 feet 7 inches long and weighed 13 1/2 pounds. It was 1 1/4 inches in diameter at one end (not circumference as in the newspaper report) and tapered over a distance of about 1-foot to a diameter of 1/4 inch at the other."

Skull diagram of Phineas Gage

Phineas Gage displaying ptosis after his famous br...

A rotating animation of the human brain showing th...

(Macmillan, 2006). On the day of Gage's injury, he drilled a hole and filled it with the explosive powder. He then indicated to one of the man he worked with that it was time to add the sand. Gage became distracted and he did not realize that his coworker had not added the sand yet. Gage began tamping directly onto the explosive powder. "Almost immediately the sparks struck fire in the hole and the charge blew up in Gage's face." (Schaffhausen, n.d.) The explosion caused the iron rod to travel at a high speed into Gage's skull. The iron entered point first under his left cheekbone and exited completely out through the top of his head. The rod landed approximately thirty yards behind him. Gage was knocked out because of the injury, but no one knows for sure if he lost consciousness.

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